Exhibition Curators' Biographies

Michael Govan

Michael Govan is president and director of Dia Art Foundation, and was appointed director in 1994. In May 2003, Govan led the organization in opening Dia:Beacon Riggio Galleries, a new museum to house Dia’s renowned permanent collection of contemporary art in a renovated box printing factory in New York’s Hudson Valley. Before joining Dia, Govan served as deputy director at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Prior to this, he was acting curator at Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Govan has organized and collaborated on major exhibitions, and has written or contributed to related publications, including: Dia’s collection at Dia:Beacon; "Picasso: Minotaur and the Light," at Williams College; and "The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932," "Lothar Baumgarten: America Invention," "The Guggenheim Museum and the Art of This Century," and "Dan Flavin" in addition to other exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum. He is co-curator of the current major traveling Dan Flavin retrospective, and has organized additional presentations of work by Flavin at Dia:Chelsea in New York City, and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Michael Govan holds a B.A. in art history and studio art from Williams College, and studied fine arts at the University of California, San Diego.

Tiffany Bell

Since 1998, Tiffany Bell has served as the project director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonné, sponsored by the Dan Flavin Estate and Dia Art Foundation. During the 1980s she was Flavin’s curator and archivist. Bell has taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, is a freelance art critic and curator, and has published articles on Lynda Benglis, Donald Judd, David Reed, Robert Ryman, and many others. She has written widely about Dan Flavin and her article "Dan Flavin, Posthumously" was published in Art in America in October 2000.

Jeffrey Weiss

Jeffrey Weiss has been a curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington for seven years. He was appointed department head in 2000. Prior to that, he was a doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Weiss holds a Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. His book, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, was published by Yale University Press in 1994. He is also the editor of exhibition catalogues on Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso, for which he was the primary author. Weiss has published articles, essays and reviews on modern and post-war art in various periodicals and journals, including regular contributions to Burlington Magazine and Artforum. New essays will also appear in books forthcoming from Princeton University Press and the Getty Research Institute. Weiss has served on various public art committees, including the General Services Administration in Washington. He is currently preparing exhibitions concerning Jasper Johns (the work from 1955 to 1965) and Barnett Newman (the period of the Stations of the Cross).

General Information

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